>>939044090 (OP)
And btw, the answer is: Social media and phones.
I know zoomers are going to hate that because they think because they turned "hurr durr phones bad" into a meme it means they don't have to address that fact ever again. But that's the reality.
Young people are struggling GLOBALLY, this is an issue in almost every modern society on earth. Whatever is causing it must also be a global phenomena, which narrows it down significantly and makes social media and smartphones an obvious culprit. People have even stopping READING, 40% less people read for pleasure than like 20 years ago. 60% of American fifth graders can't read at grade level. College professors even in the Ivy League are regularly reporting their student's cannot read books and need to be assigned videos instead. People don't have the dopamine receptors for it, we're so addicted to the internet. The tech oligarchs who run the internet are going scorched earth on society for maximum profits. It's like the cigarette companies lobbying for decades to trick Americans into not realizing that their product had enormous health consequences.
The internet has become actual brain rot, and exposing children to it so young has been catastrophic for their minds. It's making all of us more hyperactive, less patient, less logical, less thoughtful, less mindful, more tribal, more angry, more emotional, less disciplined, less reliant on real relationships in our lives like real networks of social connection and instead making us dependent on an addictive synthetic alternative to the painful emotional labor of real relationships. Social media is low cost/low reward. Social Media is like the "McGriddle" to the Steamed Vegetables that are Actual Human Relationships -- it's easy, cheap, delicious, and terrible for us.
I've been convinced for about a decade now that in 50-100 years, people will look back on this era of the internet the same way we look back on The Wild West.
Also niggers.
